Lipsher: Rockies' Dick Monfort got one thing right

One of the great things about baseball is that it's self-regulating. If you stand a bit too long at home plate admiring your home run, you can expect a pitch under your chin during the next plate appearance.

Dick Monfort now knows the feeling of having a high, hard one coming right at his earflap. The Rockies owner has been sent reeling to the dirt after a series of ill-advised, candid replies to fans critical of the team, now 16 games below .500 and 13 ½ games out of first place in the National League West at the All-Star break.

Monfort clearly should have been more diplomatic in responding to e-mails than suggesting maybe we don't deserve a major league team here.

He shouldn't have to be reminded that the fans here paid for and built his beautiful stadium and support the team by buying nearly 3 million tickets annually, regardless of the product on the field.

That said, Monfort isn't entirely wrong.

Rockies fans generally are ill-informed, displaced football fans who do not understand or appreciate the game.

Most are far more interested in starting the wave in the eighth inning of a 1-1 game and drinking on the Rooftop than they are in watching with rapt attention as one of our pitchers carries an improbable no-hitter into the seventh.

By September, the Denver Broncos attract much more media and fan attention than the Rockies, even in the rare years when they have remained competitive.

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That doesn't give Monfort license to abuse his team's fans nor absolve him of his other sins.

While he has doled out big bucks for deserving superstars Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez, for instance, he is notoriously flinty with the rest of his team's payroll as compared with the rest of the league. He also remains blindly loyal to General Manager Dan O'Dowd, whose track record in grooming budding stars and in wins and losses on the field is abysmal.

But Monfort is the rare owner who will listen to and respond to fans. Over the years, he has replied personally, by phone and letter, to my sporadic missives about improving the fan experience, just as he has done with these others. Perhaps though, like the homer-admiring slugger, he should not dig his spikes into the batter's box next time.

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